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Why do virtual objects close to my face appear blurry when wearing a VR headset? My vision is fine!

And why does the real world look strange immediately after a long VR session?

These are another two (relates ones) of those frequently-asked questions about VR and head-mounted displays (HMDs) that I promised to address a while back.

Here’s the short answer: In all currently-available HMDs, the screens creating the virtual imagery are at a fixed optical distance from the user. But our eyes have evolved to automatically adjust their optical focus based on the perceived distance to objects, virtual or real, that they are looking at. So when a virtual object appears to be mere inches in front of the user’s face, but the screens showing images of that object are — optically — several meters away, the user’s eyes will focus on the wrong distance, and as a result, the virtual object will appear blurry (the same happens, albeit less pronounced, when a virtual object appears to be very far away). This effect is called accommodation-vergence conflict, and besides being a nuisance, it can also cause eye strain or headaches during prolonged VR sessions, and can cause vision problems for a short while after such sessions.